What has Windows Phone ever done for us?

5 things Windows Phone can do that iPhone can’t

1. You can view and edit Microsoft Office apps like Word, Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint. Not surprisingly Microsoft hasn’t written versions of its Office apps for the iPhone. Apple has its own Office-alike suite called iWork, but there are 1 billion Office users.

2. Windows Phone lets you customise your home screen by resizing Live Tiles. On iPhone you can’t customise what apps are on your home screen.

3. Live Tiles mean you can see real-time updates on your home screen of emails, Facebook or any other real-time app. iPhone apps can only show you the number of notifications you’ve received.

4. Windows Phones have Near Field Communications (NFC) chips built in. You can swap data by touching phones and make payments by waving the phone over any NFC terminal.

5. You can charge your Windows Phone using the built-in standard USB socket, and any standard USB lead (from the cigarette lighter in your car, for example) . Apple has its own design socket (called ‘Lightning’) that is more difficult to use and needs a special lead. Some Nokia Windows Phones can be charged wirelessly, just by placing them on the charger.

I don’t recall listing anything that Windows Phone isn’t but, rather, doing what you’ve suggested – defining it by its unique features. You must show me how you can edit a Powerpoint presentation or an Excel spreadsheet on an iPhone next time we meet – I must have missed something there.

You can on an iPad, but on an iPhone it’s doubtful that you’d want to – although actually you can since Keynote imports/exports to Powerpoint and is actually much better than Powerpoint – and down the line will be available when out of beta on iCloud.
BUT – and this is my point – arguing over feature bullet points to the nth degree may be meat for tech journos but for most is pointless, and I dare say, tedious…
It’s the real productivity gain from having a device that is pleasant to use and productive that is far more important.
For a log time the iPhone didn’t even have cut and paste but it was still by far the best mobile device from launch.
So, I’d prefer to hear about what makes a device better rather than having more of any particualr feature (which is, as I say, a losing argument).
Nice blog by the way!

The WP platform may pale in comparison to the features and apps on Android but consider how far it’s come in such a short time since they rebooted from Windows Mobile (now that was a great OS IMO). The features announced for WP8.1 are very interesting indeed and if the rumours of RT and WP merging sometime next year, it should become a solid platform.

For me the live tiles are awesome. Why just cause I can have all my app on one home screen not five. Like the Android OS I forget what screen my apps are on and have to go searching for it and yes you can hit the all app button and find it but you would have to go through different screens to still find it. The other thing is I can download almost all apps to SD card which is nice, to bad for Android because they got rid of that. I’m sporting a red Nokia 1520 and loving it.